Synopsis
It is no exaggeration to suggest that Robert Kelly may well be America's most prolific poet, and certainly one of the most singular and ceaselessly innovative poets the country produced in the 2nd part of the past century. To date, he has written more than 70 books of poetry and fiction - books that reveal a breathtaking range, from freshly minted trobar clus and contemporized sonnet forms, to epic-length narratives and non-narratives - such as Axon Dendron Tree, The Common Shore, The Loom, or the first two installments of a recent trilogy, Fire Exit & Uncertainties. Just as compelling are the volumes of shorter lyric forms, such as Finding the Measure, Songs I-XXX, Not this Island Music, and Lapis, or his even more experimental work, such as Sentence, The Flowers of Unceasing Coincidence, or his writing-through of Shelley's poem, Mont Blanc. The deeper unity of the work is unavoidably present in the voice that underlies the multiplicity of forms. As Guy Davenport wrote: "A Kelly poem is a Kelly poem. It dances in his way, sings in his intonations, insisting on its style. No American poet except perhaps Wallace Stevens has his sense of balance in a line. [...] Kelly has nothing to hide: the untiltable balance is there to begin with." Less visible than the poetry, but certainly no less important, incisive, worth preserving & circulating anew, are the trove of essayistic materials disseminated throughout numerous small & not so small magazines of the second-half of the 20th C. The out-of-print 1971 In Time was Kelly's sole published book of essays properly speaking, even though he has been writing on his (& others') poetry & poetics since the early 60s. Long over-due, the present volume, A Voice Full of Cities, collects for the first time Kelly's essays, statements, & other writings on poetry & poetics, making available a vast array of difficult to obtain works. The editors' aim was to insure that - in Robert Kelly's own words - "the fifty years of thinking around the fifty years of making won't get lost, and making and thinking will be seen as one thing." A forthcoming companion volume from Contra Mundum Press, A City Full of Voices, will present critical essays on Robert Kelly's work by a wide range of contributors.
About the Author
Poet and fiction writer, Robert Kelly was born in 1935 in Brooklyn, and educated at CCNY and Columbia, where he studied medieval literature and linguistics. His first book, Armed Descent, was published in 1961; since then he has published over sixty more, most recently the poetry collection Opening the Seals, UNCERTAINTIES (Station Hill Press of Barrytown, 2011), the novel The Book from the Sky, the long poem Fire Exit, and his fifth collection of short stories, The Logic of the World. He has been especially interested in collaborations with artists (The Garden of Distances, Shame) and other poets (Mont Blanc, Unquell the Dawn Now). He was a founder of Chelse and Trobar, and an editor of Caterpillar, Alcheringa, and Conjunctions. He is the Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature at Bard College, where he started the writing program in the Milton Avery Graduate School. He co-directs the Program in Written Arts. He lives in the Hudson Valley with his wife, the translator Charlotte Mandell.
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